


windchimes and the smell of lemons

by impossibletruths



Series: here's how quentin coldwater can still win [3]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Everybody Lives, Fix-It, Gen, Goddess Julia Wicker, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Minor Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, Mythology References, Overzealous Use Of Symbolism, Post-Season/Series 04, Resurrection, Shadeless!Julia (Also Sort Of), Sort Of, The Author Has Taken A Loose Approach To Canon, Underworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 16:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20260735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossibletruths/pseuds/impossibletruths
Summary: In the chaos, they don’t notice until much later. The question of blame is passed around, and then the question of what constitutes a kindness, and then it is all quietly packed away and not brought up again. It’s hardly the worst casualty of the affair. And it isn’t as though the Binder has stuck around to put it back.(One could claim it wasn’t entirely his fault. It had been taken before, you see. Maybe the old cuts were still there, still healing. Maybe it was flightier than most, used to its freedom. Maybe he was simply an old man who spent too long in a book, sloppy about something so precious. Who can say?)However it happens, it happens like this: her Shade slips free with her goddesshood, and no one is any the wiser until it is far too late.-Quentin spends his time at the Shade Orphanage. Julia makes a choice.





	windchimes and the smell of lemons

**Author's Note:**

> I saw the clusterfuck that was the season 5 promo and the first thing I thought to myself (after "oh my god someone actually thought it was a good idea to write and film and air that lmfao") was "the only reason Julia Wicker would act like that was if she didn't have her Shade."
> 
> Thus, this was born. Enjoy.

> _Death comes to me again, a girl _  
_ in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. _  
_ It's not so terrible she tells me, _  
_ not like you think, all darkness _  
_ and silence. There are windchimes _  
_ and the smell of lemons, some days _  
_ it rains, but more often the air is dry _  
_ and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase _  
_ built from hair and bone and listen _  
_ to the voices of the living. I like it, _ _  
_ _ she says, shaking the dust from her hair, _ _  
_especially when they fight, and when they sing.
> 
> Dorianne Laux

In the chaos, they don’t notice until much later. The question of blame is passed around, and then the question of what constitutes a kindness, and then it is all quietly packed away and not brought up again. It’s hardly the worst casualty of the affair. And it isn’t as though the Binder has stuck around to put it back. 

(One could claim it wasn’t entirely his fault. It had been taken before, you see. Maybe the old cuts were still there, still healing. Maybe it was flightier than most, used to its freedom. Maybe he was simply an old man who spent too long in a book, sloppy about something so precious. Who can say?)

However it happens, it happens like this: her Shade slips free with her goddesshood, and no one is any the wiser until it is far too late.

* * *

Except.

* * *

He likes the Orphanage best in summer.

He knows it is summer, even though Persephone neither comes nor goes as the seasons change, even though Persephone, he has come to realize, may never come again. He knows it in the same way he knows that he can take the Express all the way to the end of the line and stand up on the platform and stare over the Isles of the Blessed, heavy with the fresh-flower scent of perpetual paradise.

(He likes this too, the dizzying smell of it, like springtide made tangible, but not as much as he likes the Orphanage in summer.)

The Orphanage is busy without Persephone. Not enough hands to tend it all, no one to catch things that tumble through the cracks, the Shades who slip past. He doesn’t mind the work, the trouble. He likes shoring up the holes, finding the frail, frightened Shades secreted away in the sprawling house, missing the rest of their selves. He’s patient with them. Waits for them to untuck their chins, sits with his palms open and up. He waits with them like they are half wild (he is right, they are; all souls are wild things and the Shade is all emotion, the most unbound of all). He knows they will come to him when they are ready. He does not mind the waiting.

A good father, say the other helpers, the volunteers and the beings who are not and never were human. Some still await Persephone. Most know better.

He smiles when they say it. Once, he agrees, and he crouches in coat closets with infinite patience and waits for the fear to subside.

_ Hello_, he says when they peek out at him. _ I’m Quentin. Would you like to come outside? _

Eventually they say yes. They all say yes, eventually. They are clever, wild things, the Shades, all emotion. Curiosity always wins out.

Persephone’s garden is beautiful in the summer. It grows heavy with fruit, with flowers. Things that should not grow sprout in abundance, olive trees and pomegranate and creeping vines, herbs and vegetables made for other climes. They all grow here, in the summer. Even if Persephone has gone away, they grow. The Underground remembers its lady.

The Shades play in the garden in summer. They play in spring and winter and fall too, but never quite like they play in summer. It is a summer out of myth and legend, the summer of storybooks, heady and perfect and perfect and perfect. The world smells of loam and green things, and sounds like windchimes crafted of children's laughter. They come to him with fruit, with sweets, with draughts of water.

“Aren’t you hungry?” they ask, flitting around him like little birds, wrens and sparrows. “Aren’t you thirsty? Won’t you play?”

“No,” he tells them. “I’m not hungry. I’m not thirsty. What should we play?”

(Somewhere inside, deep inside, he thinks: no food, no drink. He cannot say why he thinks it. He is happy. He does not want to leave. It should not matter.

He cannot unthink it no matter how hard he tries.)

He loves the Orphanage in summer, even if it is a too-perfect season, even if each day is as unblemished as the last. He does not mind.

He’s happy here.

Or he is close enough, anyway. What is happiness to the peaceful dead?

* * *

There is a Shade who will not come out.

A girl, say the other Shades, the ones who have seen her. They say she hides away in the Lady’s rooms where they are forbidden to go and she never never never comes out. They rustle about it like dry leaves on the wind, these airy, flitting spirits. Can he make her come out? She must come out. She’ll be in trouble if she does not come out.

“It’s alright,” Quentin tells them, again and again. Lady Persephone won’t mind. (Lady Persephone, he does not say, is not here to mind.) Remember how long they hid? Remember how frightened they were when they first came here? They must be patient. She’ll be ready in time, come out to play with them and make her little miracles. Wouldn’t they like to go outside, until then?

But sometimes, sometimes he sits outside the door and waits. Shades are clever, wild things, all emotion. They cannot hide away forever.

The Shade hiding in Lady Persephone’s room seems intent on proving him wrong.

“How long has she been there?” Quentin asks one of the girls, who has pulled him up into a beautifully twisted and knotted old apple tree. “The Shade in Lady Persephone’s room?”

It is late summer, the sunset days of the season, and the apples are luscious and red and ripe and fall off the branch as soon as the girl reaches for them. She plucks two, bites into hers with a sweet crunch. Juice drips down her chin; she smiles.

Quentin takes the apple she passes him. He weighs it in his hands, feels the heft and the shape, and then makes it vanish, pulls it out again from the dark cloud of the girl’s hair. She trills in delight.

“Do it again,” she asks, and he does.

“Ah,” he says when she reaches for it, her own forgotten in the crook of a branch. “The girl?”

“She’s been there a long time,” says the Shade. “I don’t know how long. Martin saw her. You should ask him.”

Quentin disappears the apple again and it plops heavy-full into her outstretched hand.

“Will you show me?” she asks, fingers closing around it. “Can I learn that trick?”

She can. He does.

* * *

Martin is not like the other Shades, not quite. He likes it inside. He draws, and draws, and draws. The walls of his room are covered with his sketchings and artworks, three layers deep and ever growing.

“Hello, Quentin,” he says when Quentin knocks on the doorframe.

Quentin has never needed to introduce himself to the strange Shade of Martin Chatwin.

“Hi,” says Quentin. Martin sits cross-legged in his bed. Quentin stands in the open doorway.

“It’s alright,” says Martin. “I’m just finishing up.”

“I’ll wait.”

Martin’s pencil scratches over his foolscap page. His fingers are graphite-stained, smeared grey. He rubs his thumb over one gritty line and pushes his glasses back up his nose, not minding the fingerprint left behind.

He’s younger than Quentin has ever seen him, even in memory. Young enough that one could almost imagine the world hasn’t touched him yet, hasn’t stained him like graphite smudges on glass.

It has, of course. It did. But that doesn’t matter here.

“Alright,” he says with a firm sort of finality. Quentin sees the portrait when he sits up: little Jane, smiling at something, doll clutched to her chest.

His heart doesn’t clench here because he is happy here, because he loves the Orphanage and loves it best in the summer. It might have clenched, once. It almost remembers the motion.

That doesn’t matter here.

“I wanted to ask you something,” says Quentin while little Martin Chatwin hangs his picture up on the wall atop a sketch of a towering castle that looks like Whitespire, slightly. “About the Shade in Lady Persephone’s room.”

“She’s not supposed to go in there.”

“I know. I was wondering if you knew how long she’s been there.”

“Since she got here,” says Martin. “A long time. I don’t know how long. As long as you. Maybe a little longer.”

“Why would she hide for so long? Is she waiting for Persephone?” He does not say, _ she will be waiting a very long time. _

Martin looks at him and knows anyway. Clever boy. Clever Shade.

“I don’t know,” he says again. “Maybe she was there last time.”

“Last time?”

“Yes.” He pushes his glasses up his nose again, hopelessly dirtied. “Last time she came to the Orphanage. Our Lady found her and talked to her a little, and she left. I suppose she’s come back now.”

He sits on the bed again, reaching for a fresh rectangle of paper. Quentin stares at him.

Out the window, the first golden leaf of autumn turns and slips from its branch. The seasons begin to change.

* * *

For those not deterred by the reputation of the Lady Underground, a far more mundane lock impedes entry to her wing of the home. It is firmly stuck shut when Quentin arrives, as it has always been.

He knocks twice, listening for any telltale rustle of someone in the rooms beyond.

No response comes.

It is easy magic to unlock the door. It is the first magic he has done here, and it sticks strangely to his fingers, makes his hands itch. He wipes them against his pants, as if he could smear away the excess. The door before him clicks, swings silently open.

Inside it is dark as midwinter. His hand fumbles for a light switch on the wall, and when he finds it there is a moment’s slow delay before the lights come up, bathing the room in a golden-hour glow. Nothing and no one stirs; the entrance hall lies empty.

“Hello?” he calls. The hall lies empty, but it has not long been empty judging by the small pair of shoes lying on their sides near the door, and the slight mess of scribbly papers scrawled in a young hand on the table with a vase, and the fresh flowers in the vase itself, like someone has recently replaced them. It is as though someone has only stepped out for a moment, and might be back any second now.

He thinks of absent Persephone and pushes further into the suite.

“Hello?” he tries again as he goes. Then, quiet as a hope, “Julia?”

Somewhere echoes a rustling of movement, a stifled sob. Quentin moves towards it with renewed purpose, finds a cracked door at the end of the hall and a dark room beyond. His fingers find the lights and radiance blooms.

It is a library. Not a big library, not like the Library. It is small and cozy, with warm wooden bookshelves and a hollow fireplace and big chairs, the sort best for curling in on cold and lonely days. The sort of chairs a child might climb into with a book and go on an adventure, chairs with high backs and deep cushions of soft green upholstery. There are two of them in this warm, small, private library, both bracketed around a small round table. One of them is empty.

In the other sits the Shade of Julia Wicker.

Quentin’s cool, dead, peaceful heart cracks. Just a little.

“Oh, Jules,” he sighs.

“Go away,” she says. She sits with her feet tucked up beneath her, arms around her knees. Her cheeks are dry, and her voice is small, and she is small with it, small and young and lonely in her big green chair in Lady Persephone’s big empty suite in the big busy Orphanage.

(Lonely, one should note, is much worse than being alone.)

“I didn’t know it was you,” says Quentin instead of going away. He moves slowly through the room, barely notices the wealth of knowledge lining the walls. He moves as though afraid of spooking an animal. Wild things, souls, and Shades most of all. “I didn’t know until Martin said.”

“Go away. I don’t want to see you.”

“Julia. What are you doing here?”

“I didn’t want you to find me. Please, Quentin, go _ away_.”

He pauses, hand outstretched. His chest hurts, a deep, unfamiliar pain, not made for the dead. “You didn’t want to see me?”

She bites out a sob.

He kneels next to the big, deep, green armchair. He is good at waiting, palms open and up. Patient.

He says, true as the winter is long and gentle as the first fall of snow, “I missed you.”

The Shade of Julia Wicker lurches forward and tumbles into his lap, arms tight around his neck.

“I didn’t want to see you,” she cries against his chest, fingers digging into the fabric of his sweater, holding him tight. He sits back, holds her, strokes her hair as she sobs. “I didn’t want to see you here, like this. It’s _ wrong_. It’s not fair. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t _ be _ here.”

It is a long, long time before she cries herself quiet again. He holds her through it, hand on her hair. It is terrible to see her. It’s wonderful.

“Julia,” she says when she’s wrung herself out, when she’s a heavy weight against his chest. “You have to go back. The rest of you needs her Shade.”

“I don’t want to,” she says quietly. Her face is a blotchy mess. “It’ll hurt.”

His amber-trapped heart cracks a little wider. “You have so much living left to do. You’ll have to be whole for a long while longer.”

Fresh tears well in her eyes. “It’s not fair,” she grinds.”You’re supposed to be there too.”

He strokes her hair. “It’s alright,” he says. “I’m happy here.” 

He has the Orphanage, and the garden, which he loves. He has found peace in that. What more does he need?

She doesn’t reply. Quentin sits with her, patient, as the room drains around them, emotion pooling out in dribs and drabs. It is an awful lot like peace. Most things are, here.

“Do you know,” she says eventually, “there’s a story that says if you don’t eat or drink anything the Underworld gives you for a year and a day you can walk free?” She leans out of his embrace to look at him. He tucks a lock of hair behind her ear with a frail smile.

“It sounds like a nice story,” he says gently. She sighs.

“Yeah,” she agrees. She says it as though her heart has broken.

(Well. It has.)

“Julia,” says Quentin in that same kind, gentle voice. “You can’t stay here. You have to go back.”

She says, after a long, silent moment, “I don’t know the way.”

“Alright,” he sighs. “Alright.”

It takes a moment to untangle her arms from around his neck, to set the both of them back on their feet. He takes her little hand in his.

He says, “I’ll take you home.”

He locks Persephone’s rooms behind him when they leave. He does not think she will be back for them, but he locks them nevertheless with the same prickling tingle of magic. Just in case.

It feels like a farewell. He will be back, of course, because he loves the Orphanage, because he is at peace, but it feels like goodbye.

Julia does not let go of his hand, nor he hers.

* * *

The first train that comes does not let them on.

“No ticket,” says the conductor, looking at Julia. He does not care that Quentin has a ticket, that Julia is his charge, that this is important. “No ticket, no passage.”

The doors close. The train pulls onward to its next stop, leaving Quentin and Julia’s little Shade alone on the platform.

“It’s alright,” says the Shade. “It’s better like this. I’ll stay.”

“No,” says Quentin, irritated. It is a strange feeling, irritation. He has not been irritated in some time now; it fits uncomfortably around him. “I’m taking you home.”

Julia’s Shade tilts her head at him, birdlike. She does not respond.

It is an easy trick of magic to turn one ticket into two, even if magic feels strange and uncomfortable here in this place. When the next train comes, the conductor does not turn them away.

They sit side by side, Julia at the window, watching a world roll past, a million million resting places flashing by. Quentin’s is out there somewhere. He does not visit it often. He likes the Orphanage.

(If he is being honest, the wooden cottage door makes his chest ache. The Orphanage holds fewer memories, and offers more work, good work, fixing things. The gardens smells of lemons and apples and a hundred growing things, and none of them are peaches.)

They ride the train until they reach the end of the line. The conductor leaves them at the edge of an endless field. There is no platform, only golden wheatgrass waving in an absent breeze. Julia’s hand is cool in his. Behind them the train chugs back where it came from, leaving them tiny and alone at the edge of the grassland. Quentin brings his hand up to shield his eyes from the flat, unchanging glare of sourceless light. Julia mirrors him.

“How do you know this is the right way?”

“I just do,” he says. He drops his hand.

The grass rises up nearly as tall as Julia’s little Shade, sighing and soughing with the song of a thousand souls long-since passed. This was Asphodel once, a very long time ago. Things are different now, but the Underworld remembers what it once was. Some things cannot be unlearned. Death is old. It remembers.

“Won’t they mind us coming here?”

“They’ll understand.”

“Quentin.” She tugs her hand free of his, forcing him to stop. “Why won’t you let me stay? It will be better like that. You won’t be alone. Julia doesn’t need me. She can go without me. She’d done it before. She learned how to do it.”

“Then she would be alone,” Quentin reasons.

“I don’t care.”

“Julia––”

“No! I don’t want to!”

“Julia.”

She kicks at the stalks underfoot, grown and fallen brown-dead to make way for fresh grass to grow in this sun-less, sky-less world.

Quentin says, “Why won’t you go?”

“It will hurt more,” she murmurs, feet scuff scuff scuffing. “What if it hurts too much? What if we can’t stand it?”

He kneels, takes both her little hands in his. They are soft, unscarred by time and trouble and magic. She will not look at him for a long minute, and then she pins him with a gaze so sharp he nearly flinches. Nearly.

“You are the strongest person I know,” Quentin says to her. “You’ll be okay. Not right away maybe, but–– you’ll get there. I promise.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I’m here without all of you.”

“It’s not the same.” She is unsure about it, though, lip trembling. Quentin squeezes her hands and stands.

“C’mon,” he says, soft and sorry. “We still have a long way to walk before we reach the river.”

Day and night do not turn in the Underworld. There is neither sun nor moon to track each other across the sky. Such change is for the mortal world, not the pantomime facsimile of the afterlife. Without such benchmarks, there is no way to say how long they walk. Long enough for Julia’s feet to grow sore. Long enough for Quentin to lift her up and carry her. She is too large for it, just, but he carries her anyway, heavy with her arms wrapped around her neck. He does not mind the extra burden.

She sleeps in short bursts. Quentin does not. The dead, like the sky, do not change. Nature has run its course in life; it has no place here after death. He does not grow weary; he needs no rest. He could walk like this forever and lose nothing but his mind.

The rush of the river rises slowly over the rustling of the empty grasslands. Golden stalks bend and wave with greater vigor as the travelers approach. _ Turn back! _ they are saying, empty memories of spirits who once walked these parts.

They do not turn back.

The river is a dangerous place for wandering spirits, a whitewater warning marking the boundary between worlds. Quentin and Julia come across it hand in hand, Julia’s little Shade impatient to walk again, Quentin unflagging in his quest to see her back to herself. Grasses give sudden way to a bank sculpted by eons of rushing water, wear carving the bank into a canyon, water scudding past far below.

They stand at the edge of the world and peer down into the chasm.

“What happens if you fall?” asks Julia, voice whisked away by the roar of the water.

It is a good question. They are already dead. Or half-dead, in Julia’s case. It is not as though death can await them at the bottom, no more than it already has them at the top.

“You forget,” says Quentin.

There is a great deal of forgetting in death, on all sides. The living lose memories to time and age and grief. Great hurts and happiness are remembered and re-remembered until the remembrance itself is an act of forgetting, clumsy hand smudging out the fine details until only the vague shape of memory remains. The turning of the years takes with it the names of absent friends and family, until there is not a soul left alive to recall those gone before. And the dead have their forgetting too: the feel of the sun on skin, the taste of fresh food, the comfort of a lover’s touch. They must forget to survive; to remember their mortal lives without the haze of a peaceful death would drive them to madness. Eternity is a terrible truth to bear. Forgetting is so much kinder.

But it is a different thing to forget longing and to forget oneself. To lose so wholly and completely that even the peace of the Underworld cannot permeate one’s afterlife. To wander Asphodel aimlessly, uncared for, alone and absent, forever. To lose oneself is the greatest loss of all.

The river is a dangerous place. Quentin shivers, uncertainty blooming deep in his chest, Persephone’s garden gone to see in the rich loam of his ribcage.

Julia squeezes his hand. “How are we going to get across?”

“We aren’t,” Quentin tells her. “You are.”

He can do it he is sure. Telekinesis is not his disciple, but he can hold the burning thread of magic long enough to lift her across the impossible chasm, slight and half grown and birdlike already, made for flight. He does not tire here, dead and unchanging thing that he is. 

It is not an impossible task. For her, he can do this.

For a moment she stares at him. Her expression falls piecemeal; the light in her eyes fades and her mouth tips down at the corners and her frail curiosity sputters out. She tears her hand free of his and Quentin lets it go, watches her walk a dozen paces away and hunch down in the waving grasses, their warnings swallowed by the rush of the water below. The swaying stalks bend around her, obscure her almost completely.

Quentin watches her fold up like a crane, gangly child limbs tucked in tight. He cannot hear her, but he thinks perhaps she is crying again. Here, at the edge of the Underworld, his heart aches for her.

He almost remembers life. This is the place to do it, the edge of the Underworld. Wishing want curls up his spine like a flowering vine. He can almost remember friends, family, everything he has left behind. He almost wants to see them again, to hold them, to be held in turn. It is like a word at the tip of his tongue; if he strains he can catch the faintest honey taste of possibility.

But he cannot cross the river.

The noise rising from the river canyon is like wind; it chases away any tears he might cry. He stands at the edge of his world until he cannot bare the distant taste of what-if, and then he joins Julia.

Crouching in the hollow of the grasses, the noise is not so bad. When he joins her, Julia’s face is dry, and set. Her expression says she has made up her mind about something.

Quentin knows that expression quite well.

“I’ll go,” she says. “But only if you come too.”

Quentin’s heart sings and sighs and sinks, a confusing muddle after so long still and peaceful. He rubs at it absentmindedly.

“I can’t.”

“If I can go you can too.”

“It’s not the same.”

“But _ why_?”

“I died.” She flinches, but he cannot change the truth. “I died. I’m not allowed to. I can’t.”

She stares at him, eyes hard, mouth set. She looks old in that moment, full grown and then some.

She says, “Even though you want to?”

“Yes,” he says. “Especially then.”

She chews her lip. “It’s not fair. I want you to come back. So many people want you to come back.”

Gently, Quentin tells her, “I don’t think you get to choose.”

Julia’s strange little Shade looks at him, and her face changes again.

“No.”

“What?”

She stands. Quentin pushes himself to his feet with her. She has to tilt her head back to look him in the eye.

She says, “No.”

Quentin reaches for her. “Julia––”

But she pulls away.

“No,” she says again, stronger, heavier. “I didn’t get to choose to be this and I didn’t choose to come here and I didn’t choose to go back and I am _ done _ with other people telling me how things have to be. It’s _ my choice._” Her hands curl into fists at her sides, the same wheat gold as the grass thrashing around them. The sourcless wind picks up her words and throws them back, and she speaks with two voices, three, a dozen.

She is not human, nor Shade, nor anything in that shape.

(This is the Binder’s fault. Sloppy work, throwing out girlhood and godhood both. Then again, they are not so different both begging for the belief. Perhaps he did not understand that, old man that he is. He would not be the first to make that mistake. He will not be the last.)

She reaches for him with one golden Midas hand, and he says, “What––” and he says, “Wait––” and he says, “Jules––” and she folds her fingers around his own.

The transformation takes an instant, gold into flesh again. His halfway hopeful heart roars to life louder than the whitewater rush of the river and equally sure to drown him. Blood beats in his ears and the still peace of death shatters to golden motes, and she turns him whole again.

It sends him to his knees.

“What did you––?” he gasps, hand spasming where Julia’s little Shade resolutely holds him, shining. “_How _ did you––?”

“No you have to come with me,” she tells him, proud-pleased. She pulls him up with a strength beyond sense. He stumbles to his feet and like the grass he sways, rooted.

“You still have your spark,” he breathes.

“Persephone gave it to me,” says Julia’s Shade fiercely, half wild in the way of children and souls, and gods too. “No one else gets to take it away.” She rolls her shoulders, chin raised. “I think the rest of me will be wanting it back now.”

“I can’t take us both across,” Quentin says dumbly. “I don’t––”

He does not have the power. Doesn’t understand. Doesn’t want to forget.

Julia releases his hand and takes a step forward, still gleaming in the un-light of the Underworld. She looks at him over her shoulder and says, “Don’t worry, Q. I won’t let you fall.”

Beneath them the ground trembles, fabric of the world unspooling. Stalks of wild wheatgrass twine together, long ropey braids unravelling out of the black earth underfoot, a hundred hundred green-gold growing things bursting to life in a world without sky or sun. He watches, enraptured, as she recasts the loom, weaves them a bridge that spans the edge of the world.

“Well?” she says, one hand stretching back to him, palm open and up. “Will you come?”

What else is he to do? He goes.

His heart echoes in the cavern of his chest. The rushing water below kicks up noise like wind, buffeting them with the endless keening scrape of water against earth and stone. It tangles their hair and tugs at the hems of their clothing. Julia pulls him forward resolutely, despite the swaying of her grass stalk bridge, despite the noise, despite the river of forgetting yawning beneath them, poised to swallow them whole. She glows like a candle in the dark, lighting the way long after the cliff face bank disappears behind them, long before the living world appears ahead. 

They cross the divide between the the worlds on a bridge made of spun grass, goddess before and believer behind, two people half alive held aloft in the deep, dark, empty space between life and death.

The bridge lands on a rocky shore, waves of cold-dark water lapping against it, a world away from the churning danger of the river. The air, when they step out onto the gritty grey shore, tastes musty and cave damp, and entirely mundane. Quentin shivers. Julia’s radiance fades, and she slumps, exhausted. Quentin catches her against his side.

“Where are we?”

“Underground,” she mumbles against him, self-evident and wry. Quentin smiles, a tiny little thing, improbable. The dark pushes in as Julia’s glow peters out, so Quentin calls a little light back, a sphere of illumination sitting in the palm of his hand. The magic jumps at his touch, easy and eager, throwing deep, dancing shadows around the cavern, catching on brown-dead wheat stalks unfurling across the bank as Julia’s magic lets them go. The river glints behind them, black and deep and wide enough to divide worlds. Julia’s Shade blinks up at him.

“See?” she asks, slightly slurred. “_I _ get to choose.”

“You sure do,” Quentin returns, and he sets the driftglobe floating at his shoulder so he can lift her up onto his back. Her arms loop over his shoulders.

“I think I might have to sleep now.”

“Okay. I think I can get us the rest of the way.”

“Don’t turn back.”

“Further up and further in,” he agrees, and hefts her a little higher, and starts up the beach.

It is slow going across the scree, feet slipping and Julia an uncomfortable burden now that he is not-dead, now that he can tire and falter and change. He does not stop, nor look back. Underfoot the rocky beach gives way to stone gives way to packed earth, cavern narrowing to a black fissure in the wall leading up into the dark. Julia’s head slumps forward over his shoulder, hair tickling at his neck. Quentin nudges his light forward to cast its glow over a wide, shallow step, and another, and a third.

Quentin climbs.

He climbs, and 

he

climbs

and

climbs

and

climbs

until

he

thinks he can climb no further and

his 

legschestlungsarms

_ burn _

worse than anything he had ever felt in death, but

Julia is before and behind him, split in two, so

he

takes

one

more

step

into––

Daylight.

He stumbles, blinking and blinded, tears streaming down his face. Julia flinches awake at the change, and for a handful of heartbeats they stay there, squinting and wincing in the light of day. Julia slithers off his back and Quentin falls heavily to one knee, then rolls over to lie flat on the ground, eyes squeezed shut against the open vault of the sky above him. The world comes to him in dribs and drabs: the itch of grass beneath him, the salt smell of the sea, the warmth of the sun burning through his blood and bones, chasing away the lingering chill of death.

He opens his mouth and says, “Holy shit.”

Julia’s Shade says, “Yeah.”

Quentin blinks his eyes open, one hand raised to block the glare of the sun, and looks at the girl sitting next to him. She does not look back. She stares at something behind him, Quentin drags himself to sitting and turns to stare with her.

He finds the ocean, the source of the sea salt scent: brilliantly blue, stretching in every possible direction. White gulls sweep in lazy spirals off the shoreline, which begins below them, a hillside covered in scraggy grass sloping down to the narrowest strip of sandy shore. Buildings dot the hill, white walls and clay tile roofs stacked up against each other like tiers of a cake. It is nowhere Quentin has ever been, but it looks like––

“Is that the Mediterranean?”

“I think we’re in Greece.”

Which makes a certain sense, when one is dealing with life and death and gods and miracles. There’s something to be said for keeping to the classics. Quentin marvels.

“We can go now,” says Julia. “If you want. I can take us now.”

“I think I’d like to stay here. Just a little longer.”

“It’s very beautiful.”

He breathes, heart beating, senses unfurling, remembering what it is to be alive. “It is,” he agrees.

They sit in silence before this new shore, edge of this living world. It is a kinder, fuller silence than that of the Underworld. The waves dashing against rock and sand keep rhythm like a heartbeat, and gulls cry and cheer above them, and the sun and the sky crown the world in a quilt of azure and gold. Quentin breathes it in and out and in again, until he is not quite so empty, until life is not quite so strange and awkward at his fingertips, inside his chest. Julia’s Shade leans against his side.

“Thank you,” he murmurs out to the horizon. In return she takes his hand.

Between one breath and the next they are seated on a bench in Union Square. The trees dance in the chill breeze, a riot of pink and green. Quentin shivers in his sweater and revels in the staggering sensation of it all, the people and the noise and the motion and the color. This is life, wonderful impossible overwhelming life. How could he ever forget?

“There,” says Julia’s Shade, pointing. Not a dozen feet away, Julia––full grown, blank-faced, tucked up in jacket and scarf and carrying a paper cup of coffee, so utterly mundane it steals Quentin’s breath away––threads through the early morning rush of pedestrians. Julia’s little Shade drag Quentin up and over, planting them squarely in her path.

She says, “Hello.”

Julia drops her coffee. It splatters across the sidewalk, puddling out, brown-dark flecks stark against the concrete. She doesn’t notice. She is staring at them, wide eyed with disbelief.

“Quentin?”

It is uncommonly difficult to speak. He swallows twice before the lump in his throat clears. “Hi, Julia.”

Her Shade squeezes Quentin’s hand once and lets go, stepping forward. Julia’s eyes flicker down to the girl as though she has only just noticed her. Her expression smoothes over, except for her eyes, questions forming and reforming behind them.

“How?” she asks. Quentin cannot imagine where she means to start. Her Shade is half herself, though, and understands perfectly.

“He made me come back,” says the girl. “So I made him come too.”

“You’re a hard person to say no to,” Quentin tells her. Them.

“I know,” Julia returns absentmindedly, mostly watching her Shade. She says, slowly, “You have my spark.”

“Yes. I kept it safe for us.”

“It was better this time,” she says. “I could pretend.”

“I know. I didn’t want to come. I thought you would be alright.”

“I would be.” She pauses. “You thought it would hurt.”

“Yes.”

Julia considers that. Quentin watches, outsider and observer to this private moment, as she holds out one hand.

Julia says, “I think some things might be worth that.”

Her Shade stares at her, head cocked, birdlike, wild around the edges. The glimmering, glowing magic of Persephone’s gift clings to her.

“Like being a goddess?” she asks with a wry little smile, like there is a joke somewhere in the question, or a test. Grown Julia makes the exact same expression and it ripples between them like a wave, perfectly in harmony. 

“Like caring,” she corrects, and her Shade beams. She takes her hand.

For a moment there are two of them, and then there is a flash like a camera bulb going off, and when it clears there is only Julia, fully grown and whole. New Yorkers bump past in both directions, blind to the miracle in their midst or simply uncaring.

(One of these is more correct than the other. This is New York, after all.)

“Oh,” says Julia, swaying a little. Then, “_Oh_,” overfull and overwhelmed, and her shining eyes blaze gold, bright enough that Quentin must look away. She breathes, “Oh, Q.”

“Hey, Jules,” he tells the coffee-flecked ground between them, watching the distance between them shrink and shrink and shrink until they are toe to toe, and then she hugs him tight and warm and familiar as his own heartbeat, and his soul settles inside his skin, curls up like a cat in a patch of sunlight, content and calm and full of a far greater, truer peace than he has known in a long, long while.

He hugs her back. That is familiar too.

“So,” he says, and they part a little ways, uncaring of the scene they are making. He looks at her and laughs, crooked at the edges and awkward in his mouth and true, rich and honest. “This is kind of weird.”

“A little,” she agrees. Her eyes glow, still, ever so slightly. “Or a lot. That’s kind of our thing though, isn’t it?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

She takes his hand, same as her Shade but larger, the right fit.

“Everyone is going to be so happy to see you,” she says, her voice breaking, and he breaks with it, laughing and crying both, and utterly uncaring, utterly alive.

A year and a day after his death, Julia squeezes his hand and pulls him out of the garden and back into the world.

**Author's Note:**

> you can also find me on [tumblr](http://impossibletruths.tumblr.com/)


End file.
